> This meme about Google turning into "old bad Microsoft" is a result of false dichotomy.
I'll repeat my "mantra" here: Google, and almost every known web company is very close in terms of interoperability. It's false that they embrace openness and it's incredible how "our community" is so blind. When you run an application in your own machine, even if it's the closest one (i.e: Microsoft) you can reverse engineer it, but you can't reverse engineer the cloud. So, when Twitter is talking about APIs they are lying because if you, for example, try to analyze your social network with more than a few levels you will soon crash with their API call limit. If you want to automate Google searches taking advantage of their huge index, it will be impossible, they don't sell that service. They only make some things "open" if they don't clash with their business. In the case of Microsoft we can reverse engineer everything that's not in the cloud (Hotmail doesn't matter!)
I've written more about this in some of my articles at:
It's not OT, it's talking about interoperability. Twitter and Google issues are only a single case between a whole web community that want to integrate their applications with mainstream services.
I'll repeat my "mantra" here: Google, and almost every known web company is very close in terms of interoperability. It's false that they embrace openness and it's incredible how "our community" is so blind. When you run an application in your own machine, even if it's the closest one (i.e: Microsoft) you can reverse engineer it, but you can't reverse engineer the cloud. So, when Twitter is talking about APIs they are lying because if you, for example, try to analyze your social network with more than a few levels you will soon crash with their API call limit. If you want to automate Google searches taking advantage of their huge index, it will be impossible, they don't sell that service. They only make some things "open" if they don't clash with their business. In the case of Microsoft we can reverse engineer everything that's not in the cloud (Hotmail doesn't matter!)
I've written more about this in some of my articles at:
http://blog.databigbang.com/the-data-portability-fact-sheet/
http://blog.databigbang.com/google-search-no-api/